64. Is it okay to eat a larger evening meal the night before a big competition?
It's time for another edition of Ask a Sports Dietitian where each month I select a question submitted - just like I do each week on my private podcast for Fuelled Team members.
Hi Gemma! There are so many questions I would love to ask you but here's one...is it ok to eat a larger evening meal the night before a big ride / competition the next morning rather than fuelling with breakfast? (e.g. if a super early start is needed or low appetite / nerves in the morning mean that eating a biggish breakfast is difficult). Many thanks. Clare.
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Transcript Episode 64
It's time for another edition of Ask a Sports Dietitian where each month I select a listener's question to answer in depth, just like I do every week for the team members in Fuelled on my private podcast. This month:
Clare asks, Hi Gemma, there are so many questions I would love to ask you, but here's one. Is it okay to eat a larger evening meal the night before a big ride or competition the next morning rather than fuelling with breakfast? For example, if a super early start is needed or if low appetite, nerves in the morning, meaning that a biggish breakfast is difficult. Many thanks, Clare.
Great question Clare. So there's two things here. You've got two separate time points for key fuelling. There's the night before or even the day before, what you're eating then. And then the morning, your pre -race, pre -training breakfast meal. If you've done my free nutrition quiz on my website, you will have seen how there are four key time points as to where we want to be optimizing our fuelling and our nutrition choices for competition or for racing when we're looking at better performance.
So there's the 24 hours, the 48 hours before, the day before, which typically gets known as carb loading.
There's the pre -event meal, which might be one to four hours before you actually start the race.
Then there's during the race, what you eat during that event. And then after the event, there's your recovery nutrition. So what you eat immediately and in the hours afterwards.
You can find the quiz at gemmasampson.com/quiz.
And all these time points are important for different reasons. Now, if you're trying to optimize the way that you are feeling to support your best performance for a race in particular, then you want to be ensuring that you're getting the most that you can. You don't want to be cutting corners. You don't want to be skimping and you want to be playing around with how to get the most out of that time point.
So what that actually looks like for you is going to be very different because especially if you find yourself not being hungry early in the morning or you find yourself nervous or anxious or feeling a bit sick before that training session. So you're going to be doing a bit of trial and error to find the recipe as such that's going to work best for you. And this is going to start with the night before. So yes, I would definitely be encouraging you to have a bigger dinner.
Having more food at your dinner is certainly going to help you help how you feel when you start the race and it's going to help you be in a better position to perform well. But the dinner alone isn't going to be enough to make up for you don't eat at breakfast.
So I wouldn't be suggesting you eat a bigger dinner and then skip breakfast and go and race. That's probably going to lead you to not being performing optimally. I would be having a bigger dinner and then playing around with what we eat for breakfast and trialling a few different things.
If you're trying to carb load as well, just eating more at dinner alone isn't going to cut it. Typically when people need to carb load, they are going to have to eat an extra 200 grams of carbs over that entire day. so we want to be spreading that out throughout the entire day because that might be having to double or triple the size of a meal, which tends to be why a lot of people, if they've tried carb loading and had issues, is they go to bed feeling super full because they've eaten such a massive amount of food.
And what you'll learn as you start using my Fuelled framework and manipulating your food intake around the training, depending on what the purpose of that training is, is that timing of nutrition plays a really key point. And what you eat in the morning might help the training that you do later in the day. Same thing as what you did last night for dinner, can make or break how you feel this morning. If you didn't have enough carbs for dinner at the night before and you get up early, you don't eat you're potentially going to be underperforming. You may not be getting the best out of that training session and you may not be getting the best out of your racing either.
So we do want to be optimizing each of these time points and playing around with different things to find what is the sweet spot for you. For context, my professional athletes before a key race or a really hard training session in the morning, they might be eating or in the evening, they might be eating anywhere from say 120 to 180 grams of carbs net in a meal for my female athletes. Whereas my male athletes, they might be eating 150 to 200 grams of carbs per meal before training or before racing. Again, what this is made up of is gonna be really unique to each person depending on their preferences, what's normal for them.
So is a bigger dinner enough?
Not really, because while you're asleep, your body will be using up the liver glycogen stores to keep your blood sugar levels stable while you're in bed. And part of what your pre -race, your pre -training breakfast, that meal you have immediately before you go out and train, is to top up those levels and prime you for that session you're about to do. So yes, you can go and race without having eaten in the morning, but I wouldn't recommend it, and it's likely going to compromise your performance.
Part of this is very much about practicing. testing and tweaking and experimenting with different foods. For example, with some of my triathletes that I work with, they might be very familiar with doing a really early morning bike session or an early morning run, but they may not be doing these really early morning swim sets because the pool might not be open till like eight or nine in the morning. And then if your race starts at six in the morning, you need to be able to ensure that what you're eating for your pre -race, pre -training session also works for the type of exercise that you're gonna do. So that's where it really does come down to practicing and testing the different things that you're doing in alignment for what you're about to do.
Part of this is that practice teaching your gut and your mind to eat and figure out what does and doesn't work for you. But it is very normal not to be hungry before you race and not to be hungry if you're getting up super, super early. And this is where it comes down to context and recognizing that certain foods for different environments or different situations in the day. Race nutrition, training nutrition isn't everyday nutrition. I talk a lot about how we've got everyday nutrition, we've got training nutrition and race nutrition. They're related but they're separate. And so something you would eat in a race or during a race isn't always what you would eat in everyday life and vice versa. And a lot of foods that might get a bad or a negative label in a context of everyday nutrition and health may actually be really, really well suited for racing or pre -race environment.
And people who do have that like not high appetite, that nausea, that anxious, just struggling to eat something early in the morning, I would be using things like liquids, liquid fuel. It might be fruit juice, it might be a drink mix. It might even be a like a liquid meal replacement, things like the Up&Go's They're liquid, they're really light on the gut. They might only have about 30 grams of carbs in them, but it's gonna get you kickstarted. It's not enough but it's going to kick start you so that you're in a better position to perform optimally.
Having something light on the stomach like that is, it's transportable, you can always keep it in the fridge and like I was saying before, something like fruit juice often gets labelled as bad but in a context because you can drink it so quickly, it can get a lot of energy really fast.
So with the example of fruit juice, will often get labeled bad by a lot of people because it's got sugar content, it's high in sugar. Again, it comes down to context. In a training or racing situation, you want that sugar, you want that carb that is really quick and easy to digest and it's gonna sit light on the gut. Of course, if we eat it at rest, like now, I'm probably gonna have a sugar spike and more likely to see my insulin levels result in it having a bit of a crash but putting in the context of what you're doing when and why pre -racing during racing can be perfect. So these sort of liquid strategies can be really ideal for people who have that low appetite, have that nausea and are doing that really really early morning training and they don't really feel like eating. Ideally as a bare minimum I would be trying to get at least your body weight of carbohydrate in that pre -race meal. So for most people bare minimum 50 -60 grams of carbs as a snack or as a drink or as a food.
As I said before, the fruit juices, smoothies, up and goes, even just your energy drink mix that you use normally during training, your carb mix, I would use things like Haribo, lollies, sweets from a real food perspective as we start going up. Again, it's thinking how does this sit on the gut, testing it out and playing around with it. Haribo energy gels, they give you quick fuel. But dried fruit, your body will digest it in just a very similar way. Some of those dried fruits will have more fiber in it. So for example, if you use dates over maybe dried mango or dried pawpaw, dried pineapple, like playing around with these foods to see if you like it, how practical is it. A lot of them are very transportable. They're light. You can eat it quickly. You can eat it on the go, in the car, if you're traveling to a race. we start then going up to foods that have more volume and more substance, I would be looking at a low fiber cereal, so something like rice bubbles or Coco Pops, maybe even corn flakes. You can then bump up the carb content by adding some honey onto it, concentrated, very small, but you can then boost your carb intake in a way without having to eat more food. Something that's maybe a little bit more substance, I would then go for like a rice pudding. You can make it yourself super easy, rice, milk, sugar. You can always add vanilla to it as well or you can buy them pre -made in the supermarket in a lot of places.
They're all foods that are really light and easy but it really comes down to like that trial and error and experimenting to find what works for you.
Practice in training
So the final tip that I do have for you is to practice this in training. Practice, practice, practice. The more you practice in your training sessions, the easier it will be when you get to a race, the more familiar you are, the more confident you will be because if you're unsure if something's gonna work and you test it out on a race day, then that's gonna make you more anxious and more stressed, which we don't want.
We want to be avoiding any of that stress and anxiety. So hopefully that helps you, Clare.
I look forward to answering more of your questions when you join Fuelled.
That's all for today. Like, subscribe, fuel your ride, and I will see you next time.